We will be having an open house/mini 3d printer meetup this Friday (August 19) from 4-8 pm. All are welcome to attend. We will be taking apart an UP printer for documentation/reverse engineering as well as tweaking a few others. Come on by and get your geek on!

Freeside Atlanta would like to invite everyone in the Atlanta area to a free introduction level class on open source 3D printing. Topics will include:

Basic Printer Operation

Various 3D printer designs including reprap and MakerBot

OpenSCAD modeling software

Common print materials

So if you an just getting interested in 3D printing, or are already involved in 3D printing, stop by Freeside this Thursday night at 7:30pm. People already familiar with open source 3D printing are also encouraged to come and help teach or just meet fellow enthusiasts.

One of the costs of running an inkjet based 3D printer is that the cartridges have to be replaced on a regular basis. The Z400 and Z402 use Canon BC-20 ink cartridges which are readily available.

There are currently two known ways of making these cartridges ready for the printer.

The first method is to cut the cartridge in half, remove the foam inside, cut a Blue Falcon BD-50 Centrifuge tube in half, and epoxy it and a small O ring to the reservoir at the bottom of the cartridge. This is how the cartridges that are sold by Z Corp are made.

An alternative method is two drill two holes in the cartridge, epoxy down some type of barb, and flush the cartridge. This is the method I am currently using in my Z402. Click below for full instructions and a few pictures of the process.

Miss all those Tuesday meetings because you don't live close and hate downtown traffic? Here's your chance to come check us out on a weekend!There will be plenty of members hanging out at the space doing stuff that interests us. (3D printing, metal pouring, etc). Stop by and hang out.All day Saturday (11Jun).

Bring projects to show off, or projects you'd like some advice on. Bring friends and friends of friends! Weather permitting, there will be grilling.

This event is FREE and OPEN to the public. Like all of our events, donations are appreciated. Children must bring their parents in order to attend.

Freeside is a great space, but our kitchen could be charitably described as "needs work". The countertops are old, difficult to keep clean, and just generally bad. What the heck, we're a hacker space, right? Lets hack some countertops.

Freeside Atlanta will be hosting an Open Source 3D Printing meetup. Like most events at Freeside this will be free and open to the public. We will have a number of 3D printers on hand to show off and will be building a new one during the meetup. This is a great opportunity for people to learn more about 3D printing and to see some printers in action. There will also be a special guest who operates ultimachine.com and has built a successful business around this emerging technology. Hope to see you there!

I finally had some time (around 2 hours or so) to sit down with the Egg Bot and work with straighting everything up and finally getting a good egg out of it. Trying to go to high or low on the egg just stretches the image out and makes the design on the egg look terrible. (see our first try of the FreeSide Logo on an egg )Different colors are done by creating layers in your image (like in photoshop), The software allows you to print one layer, change the color marker and then print the next layer, while remembering where it's at on the egg. As you can see in the above video, it works pretty well.

I came across this lovely bit of lost knowledge while cleaning out the space last week:

Wire recorders were a big deal in the 40's and 50's. They work by storing sound magnetically on a thin steel wire. The sound is great. The recording playing in the clip was taken off WSB radio almost 70 years ago and recorded to the wire. It sounds as if it was fresh off the air.

So why did this interesting spinning box go away? Several reasons. First, when you can cheaply make tape or vinyl, who wants to sell the latest top 40 hits in several hundred feet of steel wire? No one.

Next, hear that recording? Good, because that is the last time that particular wire will ever play. On the rewind it became tangled and unusable. Further research shows that this was a typical issue for users.

Finally, newer, better, and cheaper tech came out that spelled death for the wire recorders. Sure it survived a little while as a dict-a-phone or in radio studios, but in the end wire lost to tape.

Now if I can only find out who brought this in so I can give him/her/it credit...